Dordogne

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Our weekend excursion was to the Dordogne region in southwest France. Inland, east of Bordeaux, this area is most famous for prehistoric cave paintings and foie gras.

Now that we are well into October, the majority of campsites are closed. But since I didn’t bother to investigate this prior to departing on Friday, we barged ahead with tent in tow. Sleeping arrangements turned out to be a park near to a soccer field where yelling players and passersby kept us up most of the night on Friday, and a closed campsite where the guy at the desk agreed to let us stay for one night on Saturday (we were the only ones on the site and I still don’t know why the door to the reception was open). Needless to say we were glad to find places each night to setup the tent and avoid sleeping in the car again.

The lack of camping availability for the next several months could put a crimp in our traveling. Going from 12 Euro a night camping to 100 Euro a night hoteling is a significant budget crusher. We’ll definitely look for a more cost efficient option. Although in the few months here we have covered a good part of France: Paris, French Riviera, Provence, Dordogne, Normandy, and Loire castles. Suppose it’s not too unreasonable to slow down the travel pace a bit…

On Saturday morning we visited the village market in Sarlat. The markets rotate among the towns with each having its own on a different day. The one in Sarlat is quite impressive, even for a non-shopper like myself. The streets are closed for the market, which occupied the entire downtown, and was packed with shoppers and vendors selling various cheeses, butchered animals (the emphasis is on fresh, it is common to see the eyeballs left on a skinned rabbit or a few feathers and beak on a chicken; side note: in the grocery store in Orleans we were amused by a pile of crabs on ice on a flat table that groggily moved claws and blew air bubbles from their mouths, the ice chilled them sufficiently so they weren’t able to navigate from the table), spices, wood carvings (a unique item was a frog with spikes on its back and a wooden pole in its mouth, when the rod was rubbed across the spikes it sounded like a frog croaking), and of course, foie gras.

Foie gras is goose or duck liver that is extra fatty due to the fowl being force fed. There are many farms in the Dordogne area where geese are raised to produce foie gras. Tourists have the option to visit one of these and observe the feeding, but we decided watching a farmer hold the head of goose back and force open its beak with a funnel while corn streamed down its throat was not our idea of a good time.

In the afternoon we drove to a canoe rental and began a scenic ride past forested hills interspersed with white cliffs, occasional towns cut into the rock walls and castles perched on hilltops. The weather was perfect, I almost got a sunburn. We were in the canoe about 3 hours, stopping to pull the canoe out of the river at a cute, one street town in a cliff and then ending at a similar town overlooked by a castle on the cliff with the houses clustered and clinging to the rocks around it. We had over an hour to wait until the van would pick us up to return to the car. Shereen was more interested in sitting after a less than relaxing night, so I explored on my own, climbing to the scenic overlook on a very steep path through town past the castle. I found a place to buy an ice cream cone at the top (we only found ice cream bars and vanilla cones at the river level), purchased a raspberry one, and hustled down the hill reaching Shereen before the melting rouge reached my hand.

Then it was on to the closed campsite for the night. Ended up being a great place to stay; we setup a few feet from the river with only the sound of birds and water.

The next day we visited a cave painting site at Lascaux, location of the most famous cave paintings in the world. Actually we stopped at “Lascaux II”, the actual cave (Lascaux I) was closed in the 60’s after the paintings were damaged due to tourist’s breath that reacted with the limestone and an exact replica was created out of concrete with the cave paintings recreated using the same pigments and techniques accurate to within a few millimeters. Our guide was a humorous Frenchman who made us wish our one hour in the concrete duplicate lasted longer. Interesting that they have found evidence of scaffolding that was used to elevate the painters near to the ceiling. The lower portion of the cave was clay, which is not a suitable canvas, so the artists built scaffolding to reach the limestone. They still don’t know why the paintings were created; the caves weren’t used as homes since they are cold and damp, there’s inadequate ventilation for fires, and nice animals like bears spent time in them. There was an obvious pattern in the layout of several of the paintings and the contours of the walls were used to define the horns, bellies, backs, and walking paths of the bulls and horses.

After this we stopped at a medieval town that was carved into the rock face of a cliff. At a time when enemies could come unexpectedly, this town was protected by a narrow rock path with a drawbridge spanning a gap, overlooked by holes carved in the rock for sentries. In the distance were lookout caves that were used to relay signals when strangers approached. The town would have been quite secure since the only way to reach it was by the path, or by scaling or descending the rock. The slice cut from the rock for the living area was huge, with different sections for a church (with a curved roof to improve acoustics and a notch for a bell in the cliff), butcher (with large basins in the rock floor for blood and guts), blacksmith, and living areas. A stone walkway led to a ledge where trebuchet style weapons would launch projectiles at ships on the nearby river.

That was the last stop of our Dordogne experience. There are several caves with cave paintings in the area; another that looked interesting we arrived too late since they only allow 12 visitors at a time to prevent damage. And we missed the drama of seeing a goose getting its gullet stuffed…